Coercive confinement in Ireland

Patients, prisoners and penitents

Eoin O'Sullivan and Ian O'Donnell

The first book to offer a sustained analysis of the architecture of confinement in Ireland in the first half-century after Independence Draws on accounts that were published at the time, but have hitherto escaped scholarly and public attention Includes personal testimonies, investigative journalism, parliamentary debates and the reports of commissions of inquiry Provides an integrated and provocative explanation for the high rates of coercive confinement in Ireland Raises a series of theoretical and empirical questions for scholars in other jurisdictions

Coercive confinement in Ireland

Patients, prisoners and penitents

Eoin O'Sullivan and Ian O'Donnell

Description

During the first fifty years of Irish independence, tens of thousands of men, women and children were incarcerated in institutions. Psychiatric hospitals, mother and baby homes, Magdalen homes, Reformatory and Industrial schools, prisons and Borstal formed a network of institutions of coercive confinement that was integral to the emerging state. This unique volume provides a wealth of contemporaneous accounts of what life was like within these austere and forbidding places as well as offering a compelling explanation for the longevity of the system and the reasons for its ultimate decline.

While many accounts exist of individual institutions and the factors associated with their operation, this is the first attempt to provide a holistic account of the interlocking range of institutions that dominated the physical landscape and, in many ways, underpinned the rural economy. Highlighting the overlapping roles of church, state and family in the maintenance of these forms of social control, this book will appeal to those interested in understanding twentieth-century Ireland: in particular, historians, legal scholars, criminologists, sociologists and other social scientists. These arguments take on special importance as Irish society continues to grapple with the legacy of its extensive use of institutionalisation.

16. Dungeons Deep: A Monograph on Prisons, Borstals, Reformatories and Industrial Schools in the Republic of Ireland, and Some Reflections on Crime and Punishment and Matters Relating Thereto Peadar Cowan, 1960.

Further Reading

Part III. Troubled and Troublesome Children

17. Report Commission of Inquiry into the Reformatory and Industrial School System, 1936.

18. Memorandum on Children in Institutions, Boarded out and Nurse Children Joint Committee of Women?s Societies and Social Workers, 1943.

19. Founded on Fear: Letterfrack Industrial School, War and Exile Peter Tyrrell, 1959.

20. Some of our Children: A Report on the Residential Care of the Deprived Child in Ireland Tuairim, 1966.

Coercive confinement in Ireland

Patients, prisoners and penitents

Eoin O'Sullivan and Ian O'Donnell

Reviews and Awards

"Most of these people were simply locked up in state institutions, creating a shameful legacy that is only now being dragged into the light. Coercive Confinement in Ireland is a valuable contribution to that process."

"Some of the documents reproduced here give a powerful insight into the social mores of the time."

"Coercive Confinement in Ireland deserves a readership well beyond its jurisdiction of interest."

"Coercive Confinement raises important questions about levels of awareness among the general population and challenges the notion that Irish Society was ignorant of the existence of Magdalene convents and industrial schools until the late twentieth century."

"This book provides an invaluable contribution to criminology in Ireland and wider afield."

"Among the many stengths of this book is that the authors have allowed the documents to speak for themselves apart from a necessary introduction to each one. Their analysis of the collection is saved for the insightful and typically well-informed introductory and concluding chapters. This book eloquently traces the heavy dependence on institutional punishment and 'care' by those charged with or self-appointed in the field of criminal justice and moral policing in twentieth-century Ireland."

"The book is strongly recommended for scholars, students or anybody concerned with understanding at first-hand, some of the thinking that under-pinned the many layers of institutional detention to which the Irish state was firmly wedded."

" lively and intelligent"

" the authors put forward a more holistic analysis of those other forms of confinement"

"This is a hugely important, major and scholarly contribution to our understanding of the different forms and shapes of regulatory control." -- (Loraine Gelsthorpe, The Howard Journal Vol 53 No 1, Feb 2014)